Class 1 - Monday, February 6th 2012

Tonight was the first class in our Special Education in the Regular Classroom course.  We spent some time watching the PBS documentary, "Lives Worth Living", which documents the recent history of the disability rights movement in the United States.  Our reason for watching this film was that it covered a lot of the material from the first chapter of our textbook.  I found the film informative and moving, and was an interesting way to cover the material, holding everyone's attention.

As an Australian with very little knowledge of the history of this movement in the US, I found learning about this interesting.  The interviews they had with members of the movement brought a level of reality to the documentary, and also highlighted how recent a lot of the developments were.

One of the points that I found interesting from the beginning of the documentary was that soldiers returning from wars with disabilities were looked at very differently from those born with disabilities.  They were seen as "heroes" and the nation provided them with hospitals and centres for treatment and rehabilitation.  They were given opportunities to continue in society and provided with benefits to help them.  This treatment helped to show others with disabilities the way that they should all be treated, not just those returning from war.

The documentary also showed footage from a Geraldo Rivera investigation into the Willowbrook State School.  This footage proved to be quite shocking, the way the students were mistreated and the lack of any rehabilitation facilities to help them.  You can see a preview of the report below:



One new concept that I heard about at tonight's class was Universal Design for Learning, or UDL.  I found this website was quite useful for explaining the concepts.

We also spoke after the video about testing in special education - this topic was of interest as it the same topic that my group is going to be presenting on next week.  To help with our presentation, I found a copy of a textbook, "Assessment in Special and Inclusive Education", by John Salvia, James Ysseldyke, and Sara Bolt.  I plan to share this with my group members to see if it could be of help to us next week.